Performance increases in computers are generally related to the evolution of components and assemblies such as memory, hard drives, processors, and graphics accelerators. Somewhat lagging in evolution has been the bus that is employed for interconnecting the components and assemblies of computers. Recently, several new standards for next generation high speed buses have been proposed. In addition, a new standard (Serial ATA) for interconnecting computer systems to internal storage units has been proposed. These new standards offer the promise of further increases in performance, but also present a new set of problems in creating workable interconnect designs.